Harvard is accused of obstructing the House anti-Semitism investigation

A congressional committee investigating anti-Semitism on campus accused Harvard on Wednesday of obstructing its investigation. She said the university had failed to submit the requested documents, while the committee was inundated with publicly available pages with “unexplained” redactions.

Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, said Harvard gave a “limited and slow” response to its investigation into the school's handling of alleged anti-Semitism on campus. Ms. Foxx, Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, threatened to use subpoena power to force Harvard to submit more documents.

“Somehow, almost two months after the committee first notified Harvard of its intention to request the production of specific documents, Harvard has provided only a single meaningful document,” she wrote in a letter at the University.

Harvard said it was cooperating with the investigation and has “provided extensive information” with the eight submissions it has submitted so far.

“We have had numerous discussions with the committee and plan to continue to respond to their requests as we receive them,” said Jason Newton, a Harvard spokesman, who added that the university plans to resubmit a proposal Friday serve. “Harvard continues to combat any form of anti-Semitism on our campus. The safety and well-being of our students remains our top priority.”

The committee announced in December that it would open investigations into Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT over claims that the schools had failed to protect Jewish students, faculty and staff from incidents of anti-Semitism.

The announcement followed a hearing in which the schools' presidents provided legalistic answers to the hypothetical question of whether calls for genocide against Jews would be allowed on campus. Since then, both Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard, and M. Elizabeth Magill, president of Penn, have resigned from their positions. Sally Kornbluth of MIT, who answered the question more directly than Dr. Gay or Mrs. Magill, remains at her post.

Harvard's committee investigation, as well as Ms. Foxx's obstruction claims, have contributed to the ongoing conflict and uncertainty at the Ivy League school as it enters its first semester following Dr.'s resignation. Gay. The university is also under investigation by the Ministry of Education over allegations of anti-Semitism and discrimination against Palestinian students.

In early January, Ms. Foxx, who worked as a university administrator in the past, wrote a letter to Harvard demanding a wealth of documents in 24 specific categories. Harvard was directed to submit the bulk of its response by Jan. 23, according to the letter, which the committee described as a “final demand.”

Ms. Foxx's letter on Wednesday said she had requested minutes or summaries of meetings discussing anti-Semitism by three Harvard boards: the Harvard Corporation, the Harvard Board of Overseers and the Harvard Management Company.

But Ms. Foxx's letter accused the university of failing to comply by submitting cursory documents from four meetings of the Harvard Corporation, the university's main governing body. She said three of them contained a single sentence: “discussion of recent developments on campus and the broader community regarding the war in Israel and Gaza.”

A fourth document was heavily redacted, Ms. Foxx said, “with more than two or three pages of content obscured on the grounds that it is 'not related to anti-Semitism.'” That document briefly referenced a discussion by Dr. Gay on the “lingering campus effects of the war in Israel and Gaza.”

Nothing was released from the Board of Overseers or the Harvard Management Company, Ms. Foxx wrote, adding: “It would be shocking if the Board of Overseers and the Harvard Management Company thought that protecting Harvard's Jewish students was so insignificant was that the subject was not worth dealing with. discuss in one meeting.”

Instead, according to Ms. Foxx, the university has provided “more than a thousand pages of student handbooks, university rules and letters from external stakeholders” that are publicly available. “Yet these documents contained baffling redactions, going so far as to remove the name of the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League from his signature on a public letter,” Ms. Foxx wrote.

The letter, which called the response “woefully inadequate and unacceptable,” demanded the remaining documents by February 14.

A similar one request for documents was sent to the University of Pennsylvania in late January. According to the letter, Penn's response should be Wednesday. The committee said it had not yet completed its request for information from MIT and that it would expand its investigation to other schools.

Anemona Hartocollis reporting contributed.